Design Is A Job by Mike Monteiro

Mike Monteiro is the co-founder and design director of Mule Design. He prefers that designers have strong spines. Mike writes and speaks frequently about the craft, ethics, and business of design. 

Some of the designers I’ve met, including myself, didn’t plan to be in this profession, they just kind of landed here on their creative path. I’ve met UX designers that used to be architects, marketers, bartenders, and developers. It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that design is a job; treat it that way

.

Design is a Job is a great resource for anyone wanting to get into design, or designers who want to understand how to treat design as a more serious career (not just something they enjoy doing).

Mike Monteiro “Whether you’re in client services, or a freelancer, working at a startup, or a big company, you’ll learn something from this workshop. The goal is to expand your view of your job as a designer to include not just your talent, but the business and communication aspects as well. It contains all the information about earning a living, selling design, and interacting with clients that your school should have taught you but didn’t.”

I highly recommend the book “Design Is A Job”.

Articulating Design Decisions by Tom Greever

The book, Articulating Design Decisions is based on finding what design will best suit your ideas and customers’ needs. 

There will be many different challenges all UI/UX Designers faces throughout the whole process. 

One of the main areas, the author, Tom Greever focuses on, is presenting the design in the best way possible. 

Designs will always have flaws, wether you see them or not, there will always be at least one person that has something against your design. Although, these suggestions can be useful they can also totally be misleading, potentially messing up the whole design process. 

It is important to take some time and think about the suggestions and criticsm that you may have got for the design and either improve your project, or politely decline the suggestion you recieved. 

Asking questions about the design’s flaws is a great way of going about this. 

Making sure that the cutomer, manager, CEO or the person in charge fully understands your idea is also crucial. 

This book was a very easy and fun read. Presenting your design in the best way possible is important and this book will explain it all in detail. 

Thank you for reading!

If you have any questions feel free to comment down below.

About Face by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, David Cronin,…

About Face is another book that I highly recommend. 

Written by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, David Cronin, and Cristopher Noessel, the book gave me insight into the basics of UI Design and how powerful it can be. 

Some of the key points in this book are user persona, user goals, and learning how to make your designs magical. 

Furthermore, these concepts give very thorough explanations of different challenges and goals UI designers face every day.

Knowing how to appeal to the right audience and portray your design in the best way possible is very important. The use of different methods and knowing all the different ways the users think and see your designs is also talked about in this book. 

Another thing that I found interesting in this book is learning to see UI as something magical. In About Face, you will explore different ways of representing your product as the main character of the design, and how it helps the customer achieve what they want. 

This book also includes the discussion of smartphones and how they can affect the designs for mobile apps. 

Overall, this book was a fun and easy read, full of interesting methods, and stories on how to take designing to a whole new level. This book changed my perspective on UI Designing and helped me become better at it.

Thank you for reading!

100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People;…

The book 100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People is one of the first books I read after becoming an UI designer. The variety of information given in this book helped me understand people and UI Designing more thouroughly. 

The book focuses on how designs can affect people’s mindset and psychological behaviors. There are many smaller chapters focusing on different topics such as: How People Think, People’s Motivation…These chapters help portray people through a different perspective; a perspective of a UI/UX Designer. 

The book is full of facts and examples from other people and studies which make this book very reliable and a great source for future presentations or references. It is a fairly easy read, loaded with fun and interesting facts that will help you become a better/ more experienced designer. The book doesn’t have any new information, however it will expand the knowledge that you already have by using interesting stories, facts, and studies.

I highly recommend this book.

Thank you for reading!

The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman

The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman

Even the smartest among us can feel inept as we fail to figure out which light switch or oven burner to turn on, or whether to push, pull, or slide a door. The problems range from ambiguous and hidden controls to arbitrary relationships between controls and functions, coupled with a lack of feedback or other assistance and unreasonable demands on memorization. The Design of Everyday Things shows that good, usable design is possible. The rules are simple: make things visible, exploit natural relationships that couple function and control, and make intelligent use of constraints. The goal: guide the user effortlessly to the right action on the right control at the right time.

In this entertaining and insightful analysis, cognitive scientist Don Norman hails excellence of design as the most important key to regaining the competitive edge in influencing consumer behavior. Now fully expanded and updated, with a new introduction by the author, The Design of Everyday Things is a powerful primer on how — and why — some products satisfy customers while others only frustrate them.

I highly recommend this book.

Thank you for reading.

https://www.nngroup.com/books/design-everyday-things-revised/

The Nielsen and Norman Group

Don’t make me think – Steve Krug

“Don’t make me think” is a book that left on me a very big impression. Steve Krug is a user experience professional based in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. He is best known for his book Don’t Make Me Think about human-computer interaction and web usability. He also heads a one-man consulting firm called Advanced Common Sense. Krug offers in-house workshops where he teaches do-it-yourself usability testing and provides targeted advice to clients on web usability strategies. 

I would recommend it to anyone who has a chance to read the book.

1. Usability Means…
   Usability means making sure something works well, and that a person of average ability or experience can use it for its intended purpose without getting hopelessly frustrated.
2. Web applications should explain themselves.
   As far as humanly possible, when I look at a web page it should be self-evident. Obvious. Self-explanatory.
3. Don’t Make Me Think
   As a rule, people don’t like to puzzle over how to do things. If people who build a site don’t care enough to make things obvious it can erode confidence in the site and its publishers.
4. Don’t waste my time
   Much of our web use is motivated by the desire to save time. As a result, web users tend to act like sharks. They have to keep moving or they’ll die.
5. Users still cling to their back buttons
   There’s not much of a penalty for guessing wrong. Unlike firefighting, the penalty for guessing wrong on a website is just a click or two of the back button. The back button is the most-used feature of web browsers.
6. We’re creatures of habit
   If we find something that works, we stick to it. Once we find something that works — no matter how badly — we tend not to look for a better way. We’ll use a better way if we stumble across one, but we seldom look for one.
7. No Time for Small Talk
   Happy talk is like small talk – content free, basically just a way to be sociable. But most Web users don’t have time for small talk; they want to get right to the beef. You can – and should – eliminate as much happy talk as possible.
8. Don’t lose search
   Some people (search-dominant users), will almost always look for a search box as they enter a site. These may be the same people who look for the nearest clerk as soon as they enter a store.
9. We form mental site-maps
   When we return to something on a Web site, instead of replying on a physical sense of where it is, we have to remember where it is in the conceptual hierarchy and retrace our steps.
10. Make it easy to go home
    Having a home button in sight at all times offers reassurance that no matter how lost I may get, I can always start over, like pressing a Reset button or using a “Get out of Jail free” card.

Thank you for reading!